11/18/16 – Ramzy Baroud – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, November 20th, 2016, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 4,000 interviews now going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
Introducing our friend Ramzi Baroud.
He's the editor of the Palestine Chronicle at palestinechronicle.com.
And we rerun super majorities of what he writes, at least, if not all of it, at antiwar.com as well.
And quite a few articles, at least three articles at issue today on the show.
First of all, praying for freedom.
Why is Israel silencing the call for prayer in Jerusalem?
Welcome back to the show, Ramzi.
How are you, my friend?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And I almost can't believe this, but, you know, I guess I do.
Tell me, first of all, because I'm an ignorant white boy from Texas, and what do I know, what's the call to prayer, and what's going on in East Jerusalem?
Well, the call for prayer, first praying in Islam five times a day, is the second most important pillar of Islamic religion and spirituality.
And in order for Muslims to go to pray, there is a call for prayer where a man, we call them muazzin, who would stand in the minaret, and he would make a loud call for prayer.
It's actually a beautiful recitation of, God is great, all faithful, come to the mosque.
More or less something like this.
And it's been going on for about 15 centuries now.
And in Jerusalem, it's been going on for exactly 1,426 years, and it has never been silent.
And in Jerusalem, it's particularly beautiful because you have all these mosques and all these churches in this kind of interweaving of unity between various religions.
And nobody has ever made a big deal out of this at all.
Even the Israelis themselves, you know, they demolished mosques and they arrested imams, but they never asked people not to make the call for prayer until UNESCO, the UN cultural organization, a few days ago or a couple of weeks ago, issued a resolution demanding Israel to respect freedom of religion for Christians and Muslims in Jerusalem, and demanded Israel that they should respect international law regarding this matter.
And Israel was very serious.
They complained that UNESCO did not even use the Hebrew designation of the Muslim sites, religious sites in Jerusalem.
And they began this kind of campaign of taking revenge, basically, on people in Jerusalem, ordinary people who had nothing to do with UNESCO, had nothing to do with the resolution.
There's this really vengeful event that followed one after the other.
First, they confiscated Palestinian property.
Settlers began taking over Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.
And in really well-orchestrated fashion, a group of illegal Jewish settlers go and stand in front of the mayor's house, the mayor of Jerusalem, near Birkat, and they demand that he ends the noise pollution.
The noise pollution they are referring to is the call for prayer that is made, again, for the last 1,426 years.
The mayor obliges, and he sends the army, and then they start shutting down mosques in various parts of the city.
The government jumps on board in Tel Aviv, jumps on board, and they propose a ban of loudspeakers, not just for mosques in Jerusalem, but also inside Israeli Arab cities as well.
So that's how really the whole thing was instigated.
And yes, it seems really ludicrous that a group of American or European illegal settlers would move to the Middle East 10 years or 20 or 30 years ago, and they have the right to come and determine how a culture that has been in existence for many centuries can conduct itself and its spiritual matters.
Well, there you go.
They have, as you put it, domination, as the diplomats would put it, sovereignty, over the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem.
It's conquered territory, and as Mao would say, power flows out of the barrel of a gun.
And they have the guns.
The Americans bought them for them.
And so, yeah, here we are.
It's interesting that that was the best excuse they could come up with, but I can see the point being, if it's just to add insult to injury, to say this is noise pollution as though it's a new punk rock club that opened up in the suburbs and the neighbors are kind of upset, or this is just some kind of thing.
And now, of course, what's funny is, on Twitter, all the Hasbara trolls are saying, well, they're not banning the call to prayer.
They're just banning the loudspeakers, so it's not that big of a deal.
What's it to you?
Well, there's a couple of really interesting things.
Actually, there's a lot of interesting things that can be said about this subject, but two things that are just really obvious that would have to be highlighted.
Number one is that in the Jewish religion, Friday evening, they have these kind of glaring sounds that basically come out from synagogues announcing the Shabbat, the holy day for Jews.
And what's really interesting is that after they pushed the bill in the Knesset, in the Israeli parliament, to ban loudspeakers in mosques, which essentially means the call for prayer, because without loudspeakers, nobody can hear the call for prayer, so there you go.
But once they made that call, they realized, wait a minute, the draft law is not specific enough.
And some people might say, wait a minute, if you are going to bar the call for prayer for Muslims, some people can interpret that in such a way to actually also ban the Jewish call for the Shabbat.
So now they are taking the law back and trying to rewrite it so that really it's more specific and can only be applicable to Muslims.
The other thing that's really bizarre is the fact, really, you want to talk about noise pollution.
Let's talk about the Israeli military jeeps, the firing, the bombs, the Israeli jets flying low over Palestinian villages, and this terrifying constant and terrifying beams of sounds that's happening on a daily basis over this occupied nation.
I mean, you want to talk about noise pollution, let's talk about all the noise pollution and let's try to bring it to an end.
Okay.
But this is, yeah.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
You know what, there was an article in the Washington Post, of all places, about, oh, I don't know, five or six years ago now, Ramzi, about life under drones in the Gaza Strip.
Pretty decent piece of reporting about what it's like for men, women, and children living in the Gaza Strip, where there's the constant buzz of drones overhead, and they do drop bombs on people and kill them.
And seemingly, if you're on the ground, at random.
And the children, the men, the women, the children, the elderly, these civilian human beings, when they go outside, eh, they're flipping a coin and they're not exactly sure what are the odds that they're not going to make it across the street.
And this is how they live day in and day out in the Gaza Strip.
That's right.
And even in the Washington Post, somehow it got past Fred Hyatt or whoever, you know.
Somebody smuggled this top secret report that, you know, these people have feelings and put it in the Washington Post.
It was amazing.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, but Israelis are aware of a very important fact.
Now, I said that in my article.
I said my communist neighbor used to stand on top of his house and make the call for prayer whenever they used to shut down the mosque in our refugee camp in Gaza.
It's not about religion anymore.
In fact, today, the churches in Nazareth, this is the city of Jesus Christ, the churches were actually announcing the call for prayer for Muslims because Muslims are, you know, in solidarity.
So this is not about religion.
It's not even about spirituality.
It's about identity.
It's about defiance.
Because the Israelis are not just grabbing the land and destroying the olive orchards and building settlements.
They are also changing the names of the cities and the streets from their original Arabic names that goes back to the times of Jesus to Hebrew names.
They are trying to completely alter the very identity.
So this call for prayer that's been going on for all of these years for a group of people that's really kind of thinking this in the language of domination, and we're talking about settler colonialism that is the most suffocating, I would say, in really recent memory.
And they are going after that very call for prayer.
Even the actual space, it needs to be taken away from Palestinians so that Israel has absolute and unchallenged dominance over Baghdad.
Well, and you know what?
It's a messed up world in a lot of ways, and people cry a lot about how come you're singling out Israel.
But I really don't know of another case where you have this kind of occupation and ethnic and, you know, so-called religious colonialism.
And you know what else, Scott, that makes me feel like we are not actually singling Israel out enough?
Is that I don't see a lot of people in American media defending the Chinese mistreatment of people in Tibet or people defending what's happening in Kashmir in India.
We are talking about this, and it's more urgent than ever because sadly our media completely succumb to this.
I mean, you read American mainstream media, you get the impression that Palestinians are oppressing Israelis, that Israelis are victimized by Palestinians, that there is no military occupation.
This is why it's urgent.
This is why it's important.
And sadly enough, I don't think that anybody is singling Israel out because if that was the case, then the American population, because I know if they actually do understand the facts, they would definitely sympathize with Palestinians.
I don't see anywhere around it.
So if that was the case, how come Americans still don't really understand the situation in Palestine?
And they don't appreciate the intensity and the hardship under which Palestinians are living because the media is not doing anything about it.
And of course, I'm not talking about anti-war.
I'm not talking about this fantastic radio show.
I'm talking in general about mainstream American media.
Of course.
And I can vouch for that because as a pretty interested consumer of news, it took me until I was in my 20s really before I figured out about the occupation of the West Bank.
And I guess Gaza, I found out a little bit more about that a little later.
But just the whole thing about, yeah, the Palestinians got caught up in the 67 war, lost along with their allies and got conquered and occupied.
And the Israelis haven't left since then.
And they've built these big settlements there and all of this stuff.
I mean, that kind of thing, you basically have to if you're just the average American citizen, you have to really kind of chance upon that sort of education on this issue.
Otherwise, on one hand, they portray it like it like Palestine is the country next door that is constantly sending terrorists across the line in order to extort land out of the Israelis, land for peace.
The poor hostage Israelis are being threatened with more terrorist attacks unless they give up land as though it's theirs is the bait in premise to that.
But then at the same time, they talk about, well, they're talking about whether they're going to have a Palestinian state or not, and maybe they will.
So what is the average person make of this, Ramsey?
I know because I am one back in, you know, before.
And what the average person makes of this in America is, huh, that's confusing.
I don't understand.
That's pretty much where it stands.
On one hand, they're the country next door.
On another hand, they're not.
But I don't know.
And then apparently they're the bad guys because they're brown and they're the ones who do terrorism.
And the Israelis are white and speak English.
So whose side are you on?
Absolutely.
That's how it works.
Israel has this list of coded words and languages.
They don't have to labor a great deal.
Have someone like Netanyahu appears on Fox News or CNN, and he would love these very few words.
Terrorism.
Israel is, you know, a citadel for Western civilization.
We are the only democracy in the Middle East.
All of these coded words that the average American can relate to.
And there you have it.
The issue is solved.
Palestinians are terrible people.
And most of the Americans that I've met, some of them became really quite strong supporters of peace and justice in that region, you know, can relate to the same experience.
Some of them not until their 50s and 60s, when they're like, oh, and then I read this book by Edward Said, and it just really opened my mind and I started asking questions.
So it's not that Americans are not prone to understanding simple issues, but this is the brainwashing that's been going on in our media.
Well, and you're right, too.
You're right, too, Ramsey, that Americans, by and large, side with justice.
And this, what you just said, of course, goes for all kinds of American Jews of all ages who at one point or another, just like many of the rest of us in the exact same way, they find out that the truth has this gap between it and the narrative and they rebel against it.
This isn't fair.
The Palestinians aren't even allowed to live, you know, and have independence on this crappy little Gaza Strip is all they have left.
And they're not even allowed that.
You got to turn it into a concentration camp.
And the whole thing is insane.
So, yeah, I mean, and I think you're right.
If you just pass these things out at random, if you do like the Air Force and drop leaflets on a town and say, hey, everybody, here's a map of who's occupying who over there, you change people's minds real quick.
All right.
So now take us back in history, because you've got this really great piece here.
Why Palestinians want to sue Britain 99 years since the Balfour Declaration.
So who is Lord Balfour and what did he declare?
And take us back and help people understand here, Ramsey.
Yes.
Balfour is the foreign secretary of Britain under His Majesty's government in early 20th century.
He wanted to conquer Palestine, and he understood that he could only do this without he could not do this without the financial support from some powerful people in London and other European countries.
So he made a promise in 1917, November 1917.
That promise was written in the form of a declaration that passed that was passed on by the British Parliament and by His Majesty at the time that basically states that once Britain conquers that part of the world, it will be made into a Jewish state.
That was the idea.
Now, the thing that was really interesting is that Balfour himself was actually anti-Semite, and there's a lot of writing about this.
So that's kind of an interesting little side note.
The other thing is that Britain did not even occupy Palestine at that time.
Palestine at that time was still in the hands of the Ottoman Empire, and it was still called the light Palestine, which means the province of Palestine had its own currency, had its own newspapers, its own elite, its own culture, and so forth and so on.
A month later, Britain moves in, and they conquer Palestine, and they began practically translating that declaration, that promise that's written in about 57 words, translating it into action.
And with time, three decades later, Palestine actually became Israel, and the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed.
Nearly a million Palestinians were thrown out of Palestine, and 518 villages and towns were destroyed.
And that's where the roots of the crisis actually happened.
So if you want to really pin a particular moment in history, it was that very, very short note that Balfour had passed on to the head of the Jewish community in London at the time.
And again, everybody, you can find that article at antiwar.com by Ramzi Baroud.
It's original.antiwar.com slash Ramzi-Baroud to find his columns there.
Why Palestinians want to sue Britain 99 years since the Balfour Declaration.
And now, you mentioned what's called the Nakba there, the major ethnic cleansing campaign to push the Palestinians out of what's now called so-called Israel proper within the Green Line of 1967, etc., like that.
And now, so obviously, a big part of this population, you know, the ones that survived made it to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, and they've been under occupation ever since then.
But then, how many Palestinians were exiled to refugee camps in places like Syria, Libya, Jordan, and other countries around the region?
Because they're all just still sitting there, generation upon generation, sitting in refugee camps, and they hardly go remarked upon at all when we talk about Palestine, even when you and I do.
That's correct.
And in fact, I wrote a series of articles about Palestinian refugees in Syria in particular, because when the civil war started in Syria, I think a lot of Palestinians couldn't even articulate what is happening to the half a million Palestinian refugees in Syria.
Because they've kind of like more or less been kind of dropped off our narrative.
When we think of Palestine, we always think West Bank and Gaza, Gaza and the West Bank.
But you are actually, you have half a million Palestinian refugees living in Syria, over half a million living in Lebanon, over a million living in Jordan, tens of thousands in Egypt, and so forth and so on.
And these people are actually part of the Palestinian tragedy that has perpetuated for all of these years.
And they can only be understood, their tragedy can only be understood, only if we look at the Nakba.
And the Nakba means, translates to catastrophe.
It was that catastrophe that befall on Palestinians in 1947-48.
When at the time Israel did not exist, it was really more or less, you know, Zionist militias and armed groups, and they reached the realization that in order for you to build a Jewish state on this part of Palestine, you would have to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.
They could not find any other option for coexistence.
Otherwise, it would not be demographically plausible to say this is a Jewish state if you have a population of Palestinians there.
So they basically kicked out nearly a million people, which at the time was more than two thirds of the total number of Palestinians in Palestine.
Many of these people ended up going to Jordan, to Syria, to Lebanon, and elsewhere.
And they multiplied, and now there's about five to seven million registered Palestinian refugees living in the Middle East.
And they are very much part of this crisis because they have absolutely no political horizon.
They've never been incorporated to any of these societies.
They are still registered as refugees.
It's still a problem that the United Nations is supposed to resolve 70 years later, but they've never resolved, and so forth.
As a result, whenever there is conflict, whether in Iraq or in Syria or Lebanon, they find themselves right in the eye of the storm.
They can't escape it.
So they are the first to be victimized, as is the case right now in Syria.
Okay, now, I believe the history is that the Arafat government, the Palestinian Authority, back in 1988, accepted in writing the existence of Israel within 67 borders, in other words, without the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
And I don't know what year, but I know, and I'm sure, I believe it was before this, but I know that I personally, probably around 10 years ago, saw a representative of Hamas on PBS on The Charlie Rose Show, that is, quote, even Hamas on The Charlie Rose Show, saying that Hamas accepts Israel and is perfectly willing to put it in writing, too, as soon as the Gaza Strip gets independence.
And so, there has not been a demand on the part of the Palestinian government, and I know they don't speak for all of the people of Palestine, necessarily, or the refugees, for that matter, but the people in charge of the Palestinians have said, okay, okay, okay, basically, forget the right of return of Palestinians back to what's called Israel proper, and basically cried uncle, right?
That they would settle for just the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Even Hamas, as they say, has accepted this, and yet the Israeli position is, no, we want the West Bank.
That's right.
I mean, this has been going on, by the way, back to the 60s and 70s.
If you look back at history books, you will find that this very strange but often repeated mantra, where Palestinians are being demanded to recognize this, renounce violence, accept this, accept that.
The Americans in the 70s and 80s, starting with Henry Kissinger, I wouldn't even talk to you unless you accept this and this and this.
So, finally, Arafat said, okay, he renounced violence, and he declared his acceptance of UN Resolution 242, and whatever.
All the way until the 80s, where they actually declared a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, excluding – so they basically renounced their demands of having Palestine remain unified in which both Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, too, coexist.
They dropped that demand, and that's when the Americans began acknowledging that the PLO, as a representative of the Palestinian people, even existed.
But even when they did that, that was not enough for Israel.
So, they started making new demands and new demands and new demands, until we reached what's going on today with Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
I mean, this guy, Scott, really nobody can be – I mean, he compromises to the point that he says, we are searching our school children to see if they have knives in there.
I mean, humiliating type of compromises.
And yet, they are still saying, nope, you are inciting violence because you would not accept – not just you wouldn't recognize Israel, because he does, very much so, but you would not recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Now, he's saying, but wait a minute, if I recognize Israel as a Jewish state, then I am denying the rights of the non-Jews who are living in Palestine and Israel.
I mean, you have one and a half million Palestinian Christians and Muslims living in Israel, and you have hundreds of thousands of Jews and Bedouins.
By me making that recognition, which is really illegal, you are not supposed to recognize any country based on its ethnic composition.
You just can't.
It's ridiculous.
But they still want him to do so.
And you know what?
Even if he does it, they will still come up with something else and so forth and so on.
So, it's really in this type of list of demands.
Even Hamas, under Ahmad Yassin, the quadriplegic Hamas leader that Israel assassinated during the second intifada.
Even Ahmad Yassin said, we are willing to accept the West Bank and Gaza as a Palestinian state, and that will be the basis and a foundation for peace.
And a few months later, they actually sent a few missiles at his wheelchair while he was praying, and they killed him.
So, this is not – I mean, what Israel is asking, they are actually – whatever they are asking for, it cannot be achieved, because they don't really care what Palestinians say or don't say.
They want the West Bank.
They don't care about Gaza.
They want the West Bank.
They consider it part of the biblical Israel, Yehuda and Samaria.
They want it.
They don't want Palestinians in it.
And just a small footnote.
It's not that small of one.
That assassination led to a massive riot in Fallujah, Iraq, where a bunch of Blackwater guards were lynched and burned and hung from a bridge.
And that led to the first attack on Fallujah in the spring of 2004 that did so much to kick off the sectarian war under the occupation of Iraq, right there.
Absolutely.
Ray McGovern for that footnote.
Ramzi, you do great work, man.
I'm sorry we have to go, but thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Thank you, Scott.
Keep up the good work, man.
I appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that is Ramzi Baroud.
He writes for the Palestine Chronicle.
He runs it.
He writes The Palestine Chronicle.
Great stuff there.
And we run quite a bit of it at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com, slash Ramzi-Baroud.
And here we have the infamy of the Palestinian elites, why the Palestinians want to sue Britain 99 years since the Balfour Declaration, and praying for freedom.
Why is Israel silencing the call for prayer in Jerusalem?
That's all again at antiwar.com.
Thanks, y'all, very much for listening.
That's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive at ScottHorton.org, and you can follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
See you next week.